


always before my eyes

by hrhrionastar



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Laura Hale, Gen, Hale Family Feels
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-16
Updated: 2013-08-02
Packaged: 2017-12-20 09:23:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/885616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hrhrionastar/pseuds/hrhrionastar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU season 1. Laura goes home to Beacon Hills, and gets help from an unexpected source.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. always before my eyes

**Author's Note:**

> **warning** : character death, implied violence consistent with the show

"You’ve reached Derek Hale. Leave a message…or don’t.”  
  
“Hey, it’s me. I’m here! I’m in Beacon Hills. Still no leads on who sent us the spiral dead deer picture, but we’re not the only ones reading the news: that big tan house for sale on Ash Ave has got a SOLD sign. The Argents are moving back here, I know it.  
  
“I saw Peter. He’s the same.  
  
“Something else has come up, though. I’m going to be here a few days more than I said. Don’t worry too much, okay?  
  
“Love you.”  
  


* * *

  
  
Laura pressed send and shoved her phone into the pocket of her jeans. She kept her head down. The floor was gray and grimy, but it was better than the walls and empty holes where windowpanes should be.  
  
Upstairs was empty holes where **ceilings** should be. Mice would live in the walls and squirrels in the upper stories, except that under the burning aching **gone** smell, there was still enough **wolf** left to make small animals avoid the Hale house.  
  
Which was too bad, really. Laura hadn’t had any dinner.  
  
“Ha, ha,” she said aloud, and risked a glance up. Several beams of wood that might once have been part of a ceiling met her gaze. She looked away first.  
  
Laura wanted very much to listen to the whiny wolf inside her that kept saying, **run, run.** And sometimes, as when sitting across from chemistry teacher Adrian Harris at the high school where she’d cornered him, **kill.**  
  
But he wasn’t responsible. The girl with the whacky wolf moon pendant was, at least if you believed Adrian Harris.  
  
After the fire, Laura’s first thought—her first coherent thought, that wasn’t a howl—had been, **hunters**. And whacky wolf moon pendant sounded like hunters to her.  
  
Laura felt a tingling, low in her throat. “Down, Alpha girl,” she whispered to herself. As Father always used to say, ‘don’t rush into anything. Nine times out of ten, people will give you what you need, as long as you’re patient.’  
  
What Laura needed was answers. Vengeance had to wait.  
  
It didn’t make sense, she thought. Who could have sent her that dead deer picture? Maybe that was a friend, telling her that the Hale territory was threatened, but then who could have carved that spiral into the deer’s side?  
  
A spiral meant vengeance, for vengeance you needed a crime, the Hale fire sprang to mind in mountain ash and charred, burning color, but Laura hadn’t done it, Derek had been with her in New York, and Peter was comatose.  
  
About the only real effect that spiral’d had was to make the Argents move back in. And to drag Laura here, she supposed. She hated Beacon Hills now. Everything smelled like loss, and worse, if there was a worse: stagnation.  
  
Well, if she was going to be here, then she ought to eat something. Put her stuff away. Call Dr. Deaton.  
  
Laura was on her knees by the staircase before she even wondered where that last thought had come from. Call Dr. Deaton? What was she, still thirteen and menstruating for the first time on the night of the full moon because fate obviously hated Laura Hale, dizzy with blood loss and blood lust, trying to claw her way out of her own body?  
  
Laura couldn’t imagine anything that would get her to knock on Dr. Deaton’s clinic door. Not after that.  
  
She slid open the secret stair compartment. She had just been going to shove Adrian Harris’s pathetic artistic attempt at the pendant in there and leave, but something brushed against her palm. Something sharp and smooth, like the shark teeth Uncle Peter brought home once. She drew it out.  
  
A clear blue crystal, and no wonder she’d thought of shark teeth because it was just like what the ocean would be if it were condensed and made solid and hung on a chain of pure gold, no trace metals, a werewolf could smell these things, and Laura nearly cried because it was so beautiful.  
  
Then she did cry, because it was Mom’s. Her focusing crystal.  
  
(“Is that real? Is it magic?” Laura remembered asking. She’d been seven, just had soda and half a bag of Halloween candy, so she was a little overexcited. There might have been bouncing, or even jumping, involved.  
  
“Yes and yes. No, you can’t touch it,” Mom had answered. She held the crystal over her head and smiled to soften her words.  
  
“Magic,” snorted Father, from behind his newspaper.  
  
Laura, dressed as Sabrina, and Derek, adorable in a Superman costume several sizes too big for him, both pouted.)  
  
Here and now, Laura blinked the tears away. Magic was unpredictable. She’d never studied it. Anything could happen.  
  
Laura tossed her hair and pulled the gold chain over her head. It had looked too small, and there was no clasp, but the golden links seemed to expand under her fingers. She pulled her hair out of the way and let the crystal fall against her chest. It ought to have hit the neckline of her shirt, but instead it fell inside the hollow between her breasts. It defied gravity and hit slightly to the left, right above her heart.  
  
Laura knew the instant the crystal touched her skin. She felt it.  
  
Everything.  
  
Like her senses went way beyond even what they did in her wolf form. Like every Hale that had ever lived in this territory was inside her head, all gold and green and love and history. The ache she’d carried since the fire, the pack going from thirteen to two, maybe three with wishful thinking, was gone.  
  
If she listened, she could hear the sap in the trees flowing. She could taste where the air had been, blown west from the desert.  
  
Laura lay back on the floor, not caring that her hair would pick up the dirt and dust. She’d never taken drugs—they didn’t work on werewolves—but she imagined they might feel like this. She smiled.  
  
And the next instant her muscles tightened and she lost the blissed-out grin, because she’d heard a human heartbeat. Two heartbeats. One familiar and yet not, the other a stranger. They were here because of her. And the crystal clinging to Laura’s heart pulsed with warning. Whoever they were, they were not friends.  
  
Laura was being stalked.  
  


* * *

  
  
“You’ve reached Derek Hale. Leave a message…or don’t.”  
  
Her hands were clean. Even under the nails, and after the fifth time Laura had picked small animal fur out of her teeth she’d resigned herself to never having good fingernails again.  
  
 _Ladies don’t have dirt under their nails, said Peter of the past. He stopped the car in front of a manicure place and took a generous wad of bills from the glove compartment. “Father says that’s for emergencies,” Laura protested. Peter grabbed her wrist and turned it over, staring hard at her bloody cuticles. This **is** an emergency, he said._  
  
Laura had washed the blood off in the stream that ran through the Preserve. Her clothes were ruined. Turning into a wolf did that. She hadn’t had an outfit that lasted more than a month since she was thirteen.  
  
Forgive me, Laura tried to say to Derek. But somehow, her vocal cords didn’t seem to be working. Maybe it was the ashes of her family, still lingering here. Maybe she’d choke on them.  
  
If Laura closed her eyes, she could still see it. Those burns on Peter’s face…his canines extending into fangs…that nurse, all tight-lipped and self-righteous, like murder was just another chore…the blood, the sinful thrill of letting the wolf take over…the click, as of a tile falling into place, as Peter’s soul joined the ghostly regiment of Hales who had once guarded this territory.  
  
Laura opened her eyes. The crystal lay in a corner, still shining so pure, no trace of the generous cut it had taken of her flesh when she ripped it off. The skin above her heart was already whole again, but Laura knew the crystal had taken it, somehow. How else could she have—? Only heartlessness explained it.  
  
It had been so easy, with the crystal. She’d known just where Peter and his nurse would be. Afterwards, she’d washed in the stream and thrown on a strapless white sundress and bought a pair of clip-on earrings and a soda made entirely of artificial additives from the convenience store.  
  
 _Clip-on earrings, Peter had said, Laura, you embarrass me, and she’d parried with, “until they invent piercings that don’t heal, how else can I show my adolescent rebellion?” because she’d always been too literate for her own good, a curse she shared with Derek, and with Peter if you counted fashion magazines. One day the little bullet they use for piercings will be spiked with wolfsbane, said Peter. “Until then,” Laura smiled, and put on her earrings._  
  
How we suffer for beauty, she tried to say, in the present. How we suffer.  
  
Worse than anything, worse than the guilt, was the great gaping hole where everyone, where **Laura** , should be. You couldn’t have a pack with just two people. Well, you could, and Derek wasn’t ready yet, and that was **fine** , but…  
  
Clip-on earrings were Laura’s vice. Other people smoked, or set fire to things, or tried to rip their nieces in half so they could steal the wonderful, horrible alpha power.  
  
Laura Hale bought clip-on earrings. It was who she was. This particular pair had big fake ruby hearts. They pinched when she put them on.  
  
Unlike the crystal, they did nothing to ease the ache of memory. Laura had been living with pain for so long, she’d forgotten what it felt like to be herself. To be free, but connected. Part of a whole, and the best part, as long as she was really herself, taking the prize for Best Laura every time.  
  
And she was never going to have that again.  
  
Laura threw back her head and didn't even notice when hair slid down off her shoulders to coat her whole body. The sundress fell down in two halves like a corpse. She howled.  
  
Laura’s phone vibrated across the floor until it bumped into the blue crystal. The screen lit up. “Message not recorded,” it chirped, in a happy computer voice. “Please redial and try again.”  
  
A piece of dress drifted over in the breeze from the open door and the wrecked windows. It draped itself over the phone and the crystal, so only a bit of gold chain was showing.  
  
The chain glinted in the darkness.  
  


* * *

  
  
“You’ve reached Derek Hale. Leave a message…or don’t.”  
  
“Derek. I need you to come home.” Long silence. Only one earring still dangled from Laura’s clean, in-no-way torn or bleeding ear. It swung gently as she tossed her hair to hang over one shoulder and touched her lips. “I think I bit someone.”


	2. not on my own

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back in the old hometown where they lost everything, Laura and Derek work on making new friends.

“This is Laura. You know what to do.”  
  
“Why do you never answer your phone? Are you asleep? Listen, I just chased some kids off our property. I think I know who you bit.”  
  


* * *

  
Laura took a deep breath. She glanced back at the curb, where Derek was idling the Camaro. He gave her a thumbs-up, without changing expression. She turned to the house again, and knocked on Scott McCall’s door before she could lose her nerve.  
  
“How can I help you?” said the woman who answered the door. She had curly hair and a kind smile, and it was easy to guess that she was Scott’s mother. The fact that she’d come to the door was a clue.  
  
Laura debated telling Mrs. McCall that she’d easily pass for Scott’s sister, but she’d never laid eyes on Scott (except once), so probably it would turn out he and his mother looked nothing alike. He’d have blond hair and a great tan, or—oh, yes, he’d turn out to be adopted. Anything could happen.  
  
Laura wiped her palms on her jeans. “Hi,” she said brightly. “I’m Laura Hale.” And she offered a hand for Mrs. McCall to shake. “I’m…” _selling girl scout cookies? No..._ “Scott’s,” _alpha? Not yet, the pack takes more than the bite, and good God she couldn’t say any of that,_ “….tutor.”  
  


* * *

  
A week went by. Laura took herself over to the high school. Her credentials were good enough that she got a few raised eyebrows when she said she wanted some students to tutor (Laura had gotten into Stanford, before the fire), but, as always, Beacon Hills High needed any help they could get. Soon, Laura had a list of the most urgent cases.  
  
In math, Scott McCall and Erica Reyes. In literature, Scott McCall and Jackson Whittemore. In Economics, Scott McCall and Greenburg (no first name available). In French, Scott McCall and Stiles Stilinski (‘ _Stiles Stilinski_?’ Laura repeated. ‘That can’t be what’s on his file.’).  
  
“I’m afraid we can’t pay you much,” apologized the principal.  
  
Laura clasped her hands together and radiated eagerness, thankful that the Hale finances (depleted by NYU tuition for two, but still far and away enough money that Miss Hale didn’t need to take in high school students to tutor) were not public knowledge.  
  
“That’s okay,” she assured the principal. “I just want to help.”  
  


* * *

  
“This is Laura. You know what to do.”  
  
Derek hated his sister’s answering message. Really loathed it. ‘You know what to do.’ That was just what he didn’t.  
  
“You gave Scott the old Alpha Band-Aid, didn’t you,” he accused. “I saw him after the lacrosse game. No one’s that calm talking to his girlfriend’s father. What were you thinking, Laura? He’ll be twice as bad next full moon, and he’ll have learned nothing.”  
  
Derek thought the Alpha Band-Aid was cheating. Father had used it on him exactly once, and the fuss he’d made afterward had been enough to make Jack Hale swear never to do it again, “but you have to learn to control yourself.” And Derek had.  
  
Laura, though…she liked it when things were easy. And as for her control, Derek still clenched his teeth when he remembered the message that had brought him to Beacon Hills. “I think I bit someone,” Laura had said. _Think_? She should know.  
  
He might have pointed that out to his alpha a few too many times in the past week.  
  
“What did you say to Allison Argent?” he asked abruptly.  
  
Laura’s answering machine naturally did not reply, and Derek jabbed at his own phone with one pointy fingernail to end the call.  
  
He couldn’t get the picture of Laura at the lacrosse game out of his mind. Bad enough that she’d gone there openly, while he lurked in the shadows. Worse that instead of watching Scott she’d spent a good fifteen minutes staring at Scott’s main rival on the lacrosse team, the skinny little asshole with the Porsche.  
  
But those few words with Allison Argent...Derek had seen too late to listen; by the time he honed and focused his hearing Laura had already moved on. But—as no one knew better than Derek Hale—talking to an Argent was the worst thing one could possibly do.  
  


* * *

  
Nameless, unfounded worry for his sister led Derek to drive around town looking for her. It wasn’t a weekday, or he would have lurked outside the school on the chance that it was one of her days for tutoring.  
  
Eventually he gave up—ah, tactically retreated—and went grocery shopping. Milk, eggs, bread…a bag of apples to keep the vet away, and a pair of clip-on earrings with the gold paint already flaking off. Laura’d had training in good taste, but she harbored a secret love for the outrageously tacky. Huge loops of fake gold would appeal to her, and might help ease the strain that had been growing between them lately.  
  
The checkout lady gave Derek a smile. “You look familiar, sweetie, where you from?” But the smile faded when she saw the earrings, and her heart rate sped up.  
  
“ **Here** ,” growled Derek. He hated being recognized, hated the pity of strangers, but he hated not being recognized too. Six years wasn’t forever. And Beacon Hills was Hale territory. Derek belonged **here**.  
  
He drove back to the ruined house in the woods, which, he realized too late, had no working refrigerator. It had no working shower either, which was going to be a problem. Laura would complain if forced to bathe in the stream all the time.  
  
For the moment, he just left the groceries on the charred ceiling panel Laura was using as a table. That was when he saw her phone, message light flashing red as an alpha’s eyes.  
  


* * *

  
“Miss Hale, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”  
  
Laura sat across from Sheriff Stilinski. She held her hands flat on the table so they could both see her clean fingernails. She wore a matching jacket and skirt, but with her hair down to emphasize her youth. She crossed her ankles, because Nana Hale had always said crossing your legs at the knee was unwomanly.  
  
Laura was also wearing the crystal.  
  
“We found this near the bodies in the woods,” said the Sheriff, holding up an evidence bag. A red heart clip-on earring glinted through the plastic like a drop of blood. “Do you have any idea how it could’ve gotten there?”  
  
“No,” said Laura, widening her eyes with horror. “I mean—I’ve walked in the Preserve…I bought those earrings just after I got back, so anytime since then—I must’ve dropped it. Sometimes they slip off the tip of your ear.”  
  
The Sheriff didn’t seem surprised by Laura’s answer. He smelled frustrated, but not with Laura; like everyone else at the police station, he thought she was innocent. An earring at the scene of the crime didn’t make a case, of course, but that wasn’t it.  
  
Laura Hale was a nice girl. Lots of people remembered her. She was a brainy brunette, the kind that never parties too hard and aces her SATs because she actually got a good night’s sleep first. She wasn’t a killer.  
  
The funny thing, thought the hysterical inner Laura the crystal kept locked inside, was how a whole building full of well-meaning people could be so entirely wrong.  
  


* * *

  
One of the unheard messages was Derek’s. Another was from the hospital where Peter had been in long-term care, letting Laura know her uncle was missing. The third was from someone Derek had never met.  
  
“Laura, sweetheart, you know I’d do anything to help Jack Hale’s daughter. But ‘wolf moon pendant’ is kind of vague. Wolves and moons are popular with a certain crowd, as I’m sure you know. Can’t you remember anything else?  
  
“I’ll keep looking. Give my best to Alan—he still lives in Beacon Hills, yes?”  
  
Derek let Laura’s voicemail yell at him in its computer voice about save or delete for a full minute while he just stood there, staring at the phone.  
  
 _She knows._ That was all he could think. _Laura knows about Kate._


End file.
